"It's the year 2495 and you've just been challenged! Get ready for a lightning-fast future sport. Ball Busters Squash delivers challenging opponents, incredible visuals and perfect arcade gameplay. Forget the present, choose your character and jump into the Sport of the Future!"

The basis of the game is to hit the ball past your opponents 'net' to score a point, you start off with 2 characters to choose from and only a basic racket to use, but completing challenges and beating opponents unlocks another further 4 more characters each with varying skill levels and 4 more rackets to use.

There is 3 main options to choose from on the main menu;

Arcade - Play against other CPU characters in battle matches, winner to certain scores, includes bonus pick ups including shields, freezing balls, reversed controls, walls, triple balls etc, you collect these as they fly towards you and use them using the 'play' button.

Quest - Challenges set over 6 planets with 9 levels on each giving a total of 54 levels in total, includes hitting dart boards and avoiding bombs and getting the ball through a hole among other challenges.

Options - Normal music and SFX options, choice of easy or hard modes and either 5, 7 or 9 points to win a game.

Game Status - Ball Busters was another game that never saw an official release, this review is based on a beta version that was estimated at being 90-95% complete with only a few bugs to be sorted out and a promised 2-player blue-tooth option being added.

The game is played in a 3D viewpoint, looking at the opposite player or wall, although the camera viewpoint isn't right behind the ball so you have to second guess the place the ball will hit your racket.

The 'arena's' have fairly detailed 3D graphics, each are very colourful and have nice texture effects. The player characters are nicely shaded, a bit blocky arms and legs but still better than an average Nintendo DS person!

5 different arena's greet you, each with a different graphical style keeping the game more appealing while playing, while the objects in the game are fairly sharp and bold and are easy to see as they fly towards you.

The presentation is minimal with basic option screens, although it has a nice little attract Intro but nothing else to write home about.

Very average music on the attract screen that reminds me of some poorly put together Pro-tracker tune from the Amiga!

Each of the characters have their own cheesy sampled speech that gets on your nerves after every shot! To be expected I guess but they could have added a few more sayings so that it didn't get so annoying!

The In-game music thankfully fairs a lot better than the title music with trancy techno tracks going pretty well with the on screen action

Finally SFX, not too much in this department, though the main sounds i.e the ball hitting the bat is quite decent and makes getting a return in all the more worthwhile!

Control wise, it's very simple to play, D-Pad moves your bat and 'Play' button uses your pick-up's should you have any.

The main problem though is during the early slower games you don't notice the slightly laggy and dis-jointed control movement, but during the mid-late games when you need faster reflexes most of the errors are because the control of your bat isn't smooth enough to get it in the right place fast enough, it's still fairly playable for sure but certainly one of the most annoying factors of the game.

• Good for a quick go or two
• Budget price

This is probably one of the toughest games to mark to date, on one hand it's easy to mark this off as a cheap Chinese phone game with little substance but on the other hand, it's that same game that's actually quite good fun for a cheap price....

While the Arcade mode is fun to play against opponents, its the Quest mode that adds the most longevity to the game and keeps you coming back to try and finish that level!

Original RRP was going to be £9.99 which would have sweetened the deal even more and the 2-player blue-tooth mode would have been a good laugh too, but at the end of the day, it's some annoying control Issue's that stop it receiving a Silver award.

• Control movement isn't smooth enough
• Lack of league mode